RS

FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

Why Do They Hate Us? Because They Can Do So and Live to Continue.

It was the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 Terror Attacks. Everyone who was anybody cast about themselves in a raging clustercfuk of tragic-comical confusion. One of the more obvious signs of our encroaching enstupidation as a nation and a culture was the whiny, pathetic inquiry of “Why do they hate us?”

The pontificating prefects of intellectualism offered their crack at it. Ward Churchill described it as chickens coming home to roost. Jeremiah Wright, the sordid, little weasel-spirit offering theological guidance to Then-State Senator Barack Obama offered up his putrid agreement. Susan Sontag also piled on. Having praised the murder of nearly 3,000 American citizens, she could soon afterwards die happily.

The reactions to this question outside the radical left offered varying degrees of enlightenment. Then-Moderate Fred Reed offered the best non-leftist critique when he slammed HollyOrk Nation. Let any Islamic Fundamentalist watch three hours of homoerotic cheerleading on HBO, and you can do the theological math as to why they wanted to watch America’s largest city burn.

In fairness, Fred Reed didn’t actually agree that the tolerance of homosexuality by American society justified the 9-11 Attacks. You had tune in to the 700 Club to be morally offended by that odious message.

Fred Phelps took this fringe rhetoric beyond the pale by actually celebrating the death of American soldiers as God’s punishment of our nation for permitting homosexuality amongst its citizenry. It gives me great pleasure to point out the fact that Rev. Phelps is a loyal registered Democrat.

All of these critiques, regardless of their viewpoint or fundamental logic, share one thing in common. They are all terribly wrong, wrong, wrong! Our enemies hate us because they can afford to. You survive hating the US. The same is not true of either Russia or China.

People that hate Russia or China and have the temerity to exercise that hatred, tend to assume room temperature. For all the criticism of Gitmo and US torture of POWs, the important part gets deliberately missed. People have left Gitmo with a complete set of extremities.

Spengler points out what happens when Islamists pick a fight with the Chinese over ethnic tensions. The Chinese move quickly to end the fight. Without the living, breathing ethnics, there really aren’t too many ethnic issues to be debated.

This hyperbolizes somewhat, but China was willing to perpetrate the Tiananmen Square Massacre against its own people. They won’t agonize much over the civil rights of their recent conquests.

The Russians understand well that China will mean business and expend human capital to complete the transaction. They also at least tacitly support this course of action. The recent suppression of The Muslim Uighurs offended the sensibilities of many Westerners not related to people who worked in either the Pentagon or the WTC. Russia considered it a solid defensive stop.

The Russians and Chinese have reached the point of implacable vexation with Muslim Mujahidin. They are not appreciating at all of Turkish Prime Minister Edrogan’s entry into this dispute, and now consider the Uighur Movement an international insurgency. As Spengler explains below.

Erdogan’s statement is the latest in a stream of bold moves by Ankara to internationalize Beijing’s struggle with its minority Uighur population. Turkey’s interest in the violence between ethnic Han Chinese and Muslim Uighurs is motivated in part by domestic politics, but is also a manifestation of the ruling Justice and Development Party’s contentious desire to push a pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic agenda.

Spengler then goes on to explain the tactical and strategic differences that occur between US anti-terrorism and Chinese anti-terrorism.

The encounter of Central Asian Turkic Muslims with modernity via China is tragic, and the Chinese will take whatever steps are required to ensure that the tragedy is not theirs. The human rights organizations who squeaked and gibbered over Israel’s incursion into Gaza are about to learn the meaning of the word “crackdown.”

Another reason the non-Islamic “they” hates us, is because in their minds, we get too squeamish to properly finish the job. Sometimes the weak, indecisive voice of isolationism makes you less well thought of throughout the world. Spengler, on his typical roll, delves into this topic as well.

If you betray your friends (as Obama surely did by ignoring agreements with Israel on “organic growth” of settlements) and propitiate your enemies (as Obama attempted to do with Iran and Syria) you merely make yourself an object of ridicule and contempt. The rest of the world is taking measures to address real problems in the absence of American help, and in the fear of American maliciousness. Never in history has a great power cast away so much influence in so short a period of time.

So the radical fundamentalists of the under-developed world will continue to hate us regardless of how we approach them, or why we think they bear us such pugnacious bushel-loads of malice. As we withdraw from fighting them, the rest of the world is forced to assume responsibility for that fight. As they assume that responsibility, they also dictate the OPTEMPO at which the struggle occurs. Russia and China then dictate the operational ways and means by which organized, multi-lateral terrorism is fought throughout the world.

With Russia and China picking up the gauntlet for the United States, the terrorists are now in combat with nation states that spent several centuries each under the tyrannical heel of the Mongol Dynasties. Their views on military struggles are grimmer, more mordant and perhaps more realistic than any being espoused by Versailles upon the Potomac. Operations will be more “kinetic” and rules of engagement “less encumbering.”

Tamerlane rarely fielded too many complaints from those concerned about human rights. Once they got a good look at his mounds of human cadavers, they quickly hushed their whinging and offered up tribute. People that openly hated Tamerlane lasted maybe fifteen minutes.

The surviving remnants of Al Qaeda will take one look at how China handles business in Moldova and decide Afghanistan is truly the central front in their war against the 21st Century. They won’t be tactically stupid enough to espouse hatred of those who overwhelmingly respond to it.